


Negative Space

by eris



Category: Boondock Saints (1999)
Genre: M/M, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-29
Updated: 2007-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:56:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris/pseuds/eris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Connor is making a point to narrow things down to the facts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negative Space

Nevada is the last postcard on the rack, the ugly one you send to someone you don't really like after all.

As a child, Connor's vague impressions of The Desert had been those sweeping, sprawling dunes in exotic travelogues: perfect golden oceans of sand stretching toward infinite sapphire skies, shimmering, pristine, crossed by saints and seekers on the secret roads to myth. It turns out Nevada's dry, hazy, scrub-ridden expanse of cracking mud is nothing at all like those photographs, but Connor has spent the past sixteen hours unlearning his geographic ideals one by one, until all the world could be one dead yellow horizon between the fat splatter of insects. There is nothing beautiful or illuminating about it.

"Christ almighty," Murphy raves in the passenger seat. "What if a cop stopped for it? No, that's not even--we could've _died_, you asshole!"

It's about ninety degrees fahrenheit already, climbing with every inch the sun climbs. Zero percent humidity. The dirt is the colour of dirt. The sky is more or less some shade of blue. In some free-floating compartment of Connor's mind their mother is scolding Murph for taking the Name in vain, while Connor thinks, Christ, if that were the worst of their sins.

'Headache' cannot even begin to describe the sensation scraping at the edges of Connor's eye sockets.

A crumpled pack of cigarettes ricochets off the window and lands somewhere near Connor's feet; Connor scrubs a palm across his brow and waits out Murphy's latest eruption of profanity. His other hand twitches toward the ignition, but he has a sudden, vivid vision of this piece of shit car failing to start, coughing and choking and collapsing in rusty tuberculous resignation some forty miles from the nearest Quick-Stop bottle of aspirin. He loses his nerve.

"_Children left in car just half an hour--_"

"Calm the fuck down," Connor finally groans. The sunlight is angling through _his_ window.

"Kip in the middle of fucking--whatever-the-fuck desert--"

Connor rubs his eyes and gropes for his sunglasses in the space between the seats. "Mojave."

"Mojave. Middle of the fucking Mojave desert."

"And not the middle of fucking _car wreck_. It was an accident, right? I've been up for three days straight and I never heard you volunteer, sleeping beauty."

This is the longest string of words Connor has managed to expel from his body in at least two hundred miles. It's no real source of relief; Connor's mouth tastes like an ashtray and the sheer idiotic futility of conversation only reminds him of the wavering horizon, of his headache and this dirt and dust and slow desiccation crawling over his skin inch by inch.

"_Fuck_." Murphy slams a palm into the dashboard and the whole car shakes from it.

Anyway, it's all bullshit: Murphy never actually worries about death, only about dying alone, and Connor doesn't even know that out of instinct, or insight, or because in the twenty-seven years of their lives they have never been apart for more than a week. He knows because Murphy has said so. Aloud. More than once. Connor has been making a point to narrow the scope of his knowledge to facts.

Connor almost reaches for the keys again but he has a sudden, equally vivid vision of the car catching fire and exploding, scattering what's left of them across the sizzling highway, scrap metal and broken glass and the FBI's Most Wanted Bodyparts. Better. There's a sick sense of vertigo hitching along with fascination.

"Fuck," Murphy re-iterates uselessly. "Come on, it's _hot_."

Fifteen minutes at the roadside with all their windows down, the greatest threat was routine concern from passing highway patrol. Still, Connor toys with Murphy's bullshit next: baking in a stolen '88 Nova just a short stretch from the California state line, boot full of munitions and a pistol in the glove box. Dead serenely in their sleep. With a whimper.

No, not enough. There are, he thinks, worse ways to end it.

"So are we going to just, just--Jesus, are you all right?"

Connor cannot even begin to answer this question, so he lies back and thinks about spontaneous suffocation.

_How do you keep breathing?_ he could ask. _How can you keep breathing when all you want is to stop?_

The autonomic nervous system is a stone-cold bitch.

In Connor's peripheral vision Murphy's hand lifts toward him, then falls back in the silence like a patient predator. Murphy sucks up all the oxygen and seethes with nervous energy, and Connor does not need to look, his vision fades from lack of air but Murphy is an after-image of the sun flickering behind his eyelids: gnawing chapped and peeling lips, hair curling sticky with sweat at his temples, dark-circled eyes and white curves on his cheeks where his skin burned around his sunglasses. Needing very badly to shower and shave and brush his teeth and Connor's entire body hurts, as though every electron of him stretches, reaches--and Christ, it's too hot, too quiet, too close to think.

Connor does not slam his car door, but Murphy more than makes up for it with his. "Where are you--_Connor--_"

Stretching his legs, that's all, that's it, just a little walk, just a little more space, every step a tightening vise.

Humanity has this problem, Connor decides, in the sage aftermath of his third death this morning, with distance. A body comprehends anything better than reason. It remembers every gradation of closeness allowed to it, resonates to heat it has been advised to ignore in the constant re-negotiation of personal space we live in, so that some part of you can never forget, for example, you once lay with someone you should not have touched, that even just once, no matter how long ago, you allowed one extra degree of intimacy. And now you try and try to exist in an older equilibrium, where nothing ever happened, nothing never happened, the body forgets as well as the conscience and touching is no more or less than what it ought to be. But it never really helps; nothing ever does. Each careful, sanctioned point of contact becomes one of a thousand self-imposed exiles.

The rosary, Connor remembers now. He could have strangled himself with that.

  


+

  


According to the 2005 FBI Crime Report for Boston, Massachusetts, a collection area population of 567,589 people, there were 7479 violent crimes in the year 2004: 73 murders, 268 rapes, 2649 robberies, 4489 cases of aggravated assault. That's 1317.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people in one year. National average: 554.4.

Three of them, now. Here's the plan:

Keep a low profile for the next few weeks, let media attention wander. (_Wasn't that the point?_ Murphy asks. _Forbearance, boy,_ Il Duce says. _No point to prison._ And he'd know.)

Smecker's network helps to spread New England rumours--sightings in Boston, on to Bridgeport, to Newark. (Estimated population of the New York/New Jersey/Long Island metropolitan area: 18,747,320. Violent crimes: 84,914.)

Steal a car because they have no time or means to buy one. (Property crime. Il Duce says he's stolen it from thieves, if that makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. They go with it; he's the expert on grand schemes of things.)

Move slowly westward. The rest is not their privilege to know.

So Connor drives in twelve hour stretches, because Murphy falls asleep when he's drunk and their father is most recognisable. They fake their ID's and their accents and lay low at motels without memorable names or air-conditioning, paying in cash, eating from Drive-Thru windows. Their father often leaves their room at night, but they never follow him. They pray, but not together. Murphy sprawls half-naked on revolting floral bedspreads and bitches about late-night infomercials while he cleans the guns. Connor locks the bathroom door, runs the shower scalding and rests his forehead against the grimy tiles until the water runs cold on his back, then a little longer after that.

No hesitation; no guilt or remorse. He hasn't shot anyone since Nashville, but Da has big plans for Vegas.

Some mornings, Il Duce just isn't there, and there's nothing else to do but wait.

Sunlight filters through the curtains and the dust and within an hour or two it is relentlessly, stiflingly hot. Murphy stretches out across the bed with a pillow on his face, swearing, sweating, and Connor is so tired he can't think any more, but he can't sleep, either. Shouldn't leave the room, Il Duce warned, and never together. Doubles the odds of recognition. More than doubles it, if you take into account the especial attention they draw as a pair--the way they don't look anything alike, so people assume them to be lovers. Best stay put till he returns, eat your vending machine candy and look over the route if you must, plan the next five stops. Fewer opportunities to be seen. Fewer chances to fuck everything up. (It's just the way they walk together, the parallel lines, the shape of the spaces between them: exactly like twins, or like lovers.)

Murphy talks like he just wants to fill the silence, to feel the shape of the words in his mouth and remember how they sound without shifting his vowels and fake drawling diphthongs. Sometimes he wanders through language like he's taking a morning stroll, burying his face in his arms and murmuring toward Connor in Gaelic, Spanish, French. Connor still fucks up the irregular verbs and Murphy's accent still sucks, but Connor doesn't say much anyway, and Murphy doesn't have much to say.

Murphy falls asleep watching the door and Connor tries to read a days-old newspaper beside him, but it's like being drunk when he isn't, like he can't even read English any more.

Sometimes, when it's just the two of them, Murphy tries to lay a palm on his shoulder, nape, the small of his back, just a warm, relaxing sort of weight, just a momentary rest, but Connor shrugs away and Da could walk in any moment wondering why they're not already packed to leave. So after a while Murphy just looks at him, long stretches of it, quiet, waiting. And he says something like, "hey."

That's all--just that. Look. Wake up. _Hey._ Like tossing stones into a well and listening for an echo that never comes.

These days stretch on so long in want of change that when it happens, it's almost comically abrupt. Detached, anti-climatic. Filtered through static like shit late-night telly. But no orchestral crescendos, no intercut of mourners and a sky swelling with rain. No breathy, halting soliloquies over extreme close-ups, filtered red. They don't even make it to Vegas.

  


+

  


_Why do you want this?_ he could ask. _How can you need something so badly you can hardly breathe?_

A hawk, barely visible, turns a slow, sweeping circle over the northern horizon, so Connor kicks at the dust and heads northward. Somewhere behind, strangely muted in the manner of greater distances than these, Murphy coughs and swears and stumbles after him.

Then, _why can't you just stop breathing?_

In the stories, saints will wander when no earthly map can take them where they need to go. In the stories, prophets suffer it in poetry, stagger on sustained by faith and faith alone, find their answers in sheer deprivation from all those things that humans need, like identity and stability and some notion of destination. In Nevada, Connor is sweat-soaked and sleep-deprived and dehydrated and it doesn't change a thing. You don't need to be a poet to know a piece of shit poem when you see one.

"Connor, are you fucking serious? Where are you going?"

The only thing the desert has taught Connor is that he is far-sighted: too close and all he sees are blurring shapes and shadows, far enough and he is a lunatic traipsing after invisible birds. An excellent marksman; a terrible lover.

Connor stops in the half-hearted shade of a Joshua tree and pisses on it. Disapproval hums uselessly at his ears, a tinny radio newscast, some homogeneous nonsense of gnats and flies and passing trucks and Murphy's rapidly approaching footsteps. "Fine, so just tell me the one thing," Murphy nearly shouts, though he has closed the distance but for those last few cautious meters. "Have you _lost it completely?_"

"Where are _we_ going," Connor amends, as though he has any right to someone else's after-thoughts.

(_Don't want you to die,_ Murphy had croaked, sweating, bleary-eyed and closer, closer, too many bottles in. _Yeah, well thanks a lot, Murph,_ he'd said, but tired, he was so tired, so drunk and singular and tired and his limbs were far too leaden to shrug away the searching hands--)

_Should have a fucking Hallmark card for that one, they should._

Heart disease: 102,510 deaths ages 45-64, or 190.8 per 100,000 people. A real-life, real-death sort of statistic. Unremarkable. Anti-climactic. But it's been weeks now, with the driving, the killing, the teeming souls, and still death never fails to impress Connor with its sheer understatement.

Connor pulls up his shirt and rubs stinging sweat from his eyes, thinking about Hell and Nevada's qualifications, about Lot and Orpheus and the nonsensical card-castle of metaphors he's building from heat delirium. When he finally turns to look, Murphy's still there behind him--solid, sunburnt, squinting from the glare of light. "All right then," Murphy grates out, perfectly level, spreading his hands in mock supplication. Confusion only ever makes Murphy angry. "All right, I get it. But how long are we going to stand here while you figure this out, forty fucking years? Let's hear it, Moses."

They say some twins have their own special language, an invisible bridge, a peculiar twin telepathy. This must be the opposite of that.

Murphy is biting at the inside of his mouth--Murphy's nervous habit, but Connor shouldn't know about that. Maybe Murphy is having his own private crisis; fear makes him angry, too. Maybe Murphy is scared, maybe he can't think of anything but how he is so pathetically human and alive, and how slowly he is dying. Maybe he's scared because he has never felt so discrete from everything, so wholly himself and not a single part of Connor.

Connor doesn't know; there's no way to ask that will translate. Connor knows all these things he shouldn't, and doesn't know all these things he should, and half the time he can't tell which is which, but Connor is making a point to narrow things down to the facts.

"Go on, then," Connor starts to say, but he's not sure who he intends to lie for; out here there's just the two of them and God. Murphy takes one step back and it's like a wire tensing in Connor's chest. That isn't right. It's about as wrong as anything can be.

This is why it all feels more like penance than a profession, and Connor is so _tired_.

(_Murphy thinks, God is love, God is everything that fills the gaps between people; it's Connor left to count the hours of the night against the heartbeats, too tired to shift away and never able to sleep for thinking--more than just love, or they wouldn't have the job they do--_)

Connor fishes a cigarette from his pocket, but doesn't light it. He rolls it back and forth between his fingers while he stares at the road behind his brother. "Do you know," he says, conversationally, just a little factoid for that limitless white space, "Roc sold coke to school kids?"

So had Rocco deserved a bullet, and the rest? What else had they deserved that they never got? Who else have they left behind?

Murphy makes a strange, pinched expression--strang_er_, more pinched--and studies Connor's face as though for hints. "I get it, Connor. I do. But for fuck's sake...."

He's right enough; this is no spiritual epiphany. This is weeks of musty motel beds and gas station breakfasts, fake ID's and fake accents and occasional credit card fraud, mumbling Latin by rote and nowhere left to give confession. Fame hasn't done much for this cause; Smecker's men aren't the only ones on the case now, and Il Duce had the contacts, the decades of favours to call in. Connor isn't certain but he thinks they may qualify as terrorists.

(_salt slide of skin and sweat and desperate, seeking, why do you give in, what are you looking for?_)

Murphy's still watching him, still waiting there, three steps away in the silence, two, and it occurs to Connor suddenly that in all of his morbid fantasies it had been both of them, and he still thought of it as dying alone. Suddenly Connor wants to hit him. Just punch him, right in the face, like that could jar anything in his brain, shake any words from his teeth, snap whichever piece of him won't acknowledge this awful chasm, these absurd contradictions--

When Murphy kisses him Connor thinks about the salt sting on his lip, he's bitten it without knowing in some sick mirror image of Murphy's habits, and he never closes his eyes, just tilts into the blur of Murphy's eyelids, his brow. It's not familiar, nothing like reclaiming a memory. Connor only remembers that in the same disconnected way a body remembers pain; removed from the immediacy of the thing, it loses meaning, becomes a hollowness, a succession of empty adverbs slowly edging the verb from a sentence, so that he could say, _slickly, roughly, fast hard feverishly_, but it's like describing music or a gunshot wound, just an indistinct silhouette of the truth.

Murphy makes a soft sound in his throat, not a word, not language. Murphy's tongue moves on his and what Connor remembers with perfect clarity are those things that happened _after_. Those real-life, real-death things, like closing someone else's eyes for them, like counting the remaining cash to arrange an anonymous burial. The sudden uselessness of interstate maps. Praying for so long the words all run together into nonsense.

wrong, wrong, _wrong_, he's trying so hard, but Murphy opens his eyes and Connor thinks of the desert sky in travelogues.

Yeah, maybe a few magazines from a Glock 19 are the metaphoric equivalent of pebbles in a river, statistically speaking. Maybe in the eyes of the American public they are a couple of fucked up serial killers with cultish delusions and a highly inappropriate adrenaline response. Statistically speaking.

The truth is, it was weeks ago, or months ago, or somewhere between lying for their father and lying for his memory the time-line looped over itself, this awful sense of parallel sank in, around, between, and when Murphy pulls away all Connor can think is that it's too much, he doesn't have the constitution _or_ the depth of faith to live every moment of his life failing to atone for this. Every night he thinks about dying in his sleep, but every night he can't sleep, he shuts his eyes and everything is red. Something has to give.

Murphy breathes, fast and then slow, mouth quirked in that way so familiar he could weep. Murphy says, "could've woke me up to drive, asshole."

So Connor says, "think I could sleep knowing _you're_ driving?"

Murphy snorts, and for just a moment, balanced on this companionable anachronism, everything is okay.

A moment later and the silence stretches, bends, breaks; just the two of them and God, after all. "Connor," Murphy says. "Hey. _Connor._"

Stones in a well. Standing in the middle of nowhere, on the blank page, the unbroken line. This is everything: heat, distance.

"The guns'll sell, Connor," Murphy says. "It's enough for the bus or a boat, or--whatever."

Murphy says it like he's not gripping Connor's arms so tightly it hurts, or maybe he just hasn't noticed. Connor stares at his mouth and it feels like something is crumpling up in his abdomen, then unfolding over again.

Ma once told Connor there are some rules you respect because you'll be slapped if you don't, and there are some rules you respect when there's no man on earth left to know it, because sometimes it's just not about earth or men any more. So Connor thinks about his mortal sins, and how Christ forgives the penitent. And _this_, which every cell of his god-given biology aches for even as he prays, like blood, like oxygen. "So what, that's it, then? Sell the gun, have done with it?"

Murphy _looks_ at him. Like it's an answer, that something can be enough just because it _needs_ to be. Like he thinks, well, sometimes you've just got to breathe, and trust the Lord sorts us out in the end.

"You're an idiot, Connor. Can we go? Before I shrivel and die in this piss-poor excuse for geography?"

Connor doesn't know. These aren't necessarily facts. Connor lifts a hand and lays it flat on Murphy's chest, then up, light against his throat, and Murphy's eyelids fall despite himself. Yeah, he could be an idiot. Murphy's heartbeat stutters against Connor's fingertips, hesitant; strong. Familiar; alive.

"Fucking car'll be stolen," Murphy mutters, leaning in. "Again."

Connor closes his eyes and laughs.


End file.
